Hot stamp printing has been used for a number of years to supply decorative relief or printed indicia upon the surface of plastic articles--in particular upon the faces of plastic bottles and containers. In this art a strip of foil carrying either a pigment coating or a thin metal coating thereon is interposed between the article desired to be imprinted and a die plate which contains a heated element having the desired display or indicia thereon. The article is pressed firmly against the heated die, and the pigment is transferred from the carrier foil to the surface of the plastic container by partially melting the container surface and fusing the pigment coating thereto.
To bring the article into contact with the strip of foil and the die plate there is generally provided a multispoked apparatus which carries the article. The article is mounted onto a mandrel carried by each of the spokes, with the mandrel generally having a spring-loaded gripping mechanism to provide frictional forces to hold the bottle to the mandrel during the stamping step. Exemplary of such mandrels is the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,732,807. The bottle is positioned for contact by registering each spoke into proximity of the die and foil.
After the bottle has been stamped, removal of the bottle from the mandrel must be accomplished. In many instances removal is done by hand and in these instances the removing step, for obvious reasons, is expensive and time consuming. In other instances complex mechanisms have been developed to automatically remove the article from the mandrel. But since these mechanisms are complex, maintenance of the mechanisms is frequent thus resulting in considerable amount of non-productive time.
Therefore it is an object of this invention to provide an apparatus which automatically removes hollow, plastic articles from the mandrel and which is simple in operation and construction and thus nearly maintenance free.